There are those hits that climb to the top of the music charts, live in our iPods for a couple months, morph into ring tones, do a cameo on Grey's Anatomy, and eventually reach their shelf life and disappear into the pop-music ether. And then there are hits, addictive sonic pleasures that burrow deep inside our brains. Songs that seduce not only the Sidekick-packing teens but also the snobby music critics: Madonna's "Like a Virgin"; George Michael's "Freedom 90." Songs that stick.

Rihanna, the Barbados-born singer who landed on our shores only three years ago, launched her career by perfecting the formula for the first kind. There was "Pon de Replay," a reggae-tinged dance-hall theme from her inaugural album, Music of the Sun, which stormed the radio in summer 2005. Then came her second record, A Girl Like Me, with "SOS," a hook-driven club phenomenon that heavily sampled the '80s cover of "Tainted Love" by new-wavers Soft Cell, and "Unfaithful" a darkish ballad mostly memorable for its video, featuring the barely legal, emerald-eyed heartbreaker writhing atop a grand piano. They were all decent songs, just not unforgettable.

But last year, just as some critics were about to write off Rihanna as another fresh-faced R&B flirt with, you know, stuffing where her soul should be, she unleashed a monster. Over futuristic drums and a shimmering bass line, the 20-year-old gave us "Umbrella," a synthesized love poem that Jay-Z, then president of Def Jam Records and Rihanna's mentor and boss, anointed when he rapped a few tightly written rhymes for the intro. It was a benevolent gesture that only amped up the song's It Factor. (It also fanned the rumor flames that he and she were at one time romantically involved. But we'll get to that.)

However, it was Rihanna's delivery, clear and clipped in all the right spots, and that MTV Music Award-winning video that cemented "Umbrella." Unlike one of those carb-free pop tarts trying her hardest to nail the choreography and muddying up the choruses with vocal acrobatics, Rihanna lets her Bajan accent lace itself through the -ella, -ella, -ella, ey ey eys. Her hips float in fishnets, swaying back and forth—she's the hottest girl in the club. And yet, even in the video's many phallic moments involving an actual umbrella, she comes off as simultaneously sexy and adorable. The combination is organic; how can we help but compare her to a sexually emerging Britney, who first made us aware of her budding talents by throwing on a thigh-high pleated skirt and doing school-girl slutty? Maybe the dichotomy within Rihanna is the birthright of an island girl who spent a lot of her life in a bathing suit with the beach as her backyard. Wherever it comes from, the idea that a young performer could be so incredibly game, so comfortable in her own skin, and not yet (maybe never?) affected by the physical and psychological weirdnesses American fame brings is like candy to us. We just want to gorge ourselves.

We have met in L.A. at the Grove, an open-air restaurant Rihanna chose because she spends a lot of time here. "At least I used to," she says. Her schedule has been especially manic for the past few weeks, starting with her drop-in at New York Fashion Week. "The Proenza Schouler show was just phenomenal," she says. "Everything is edgy and cool." The love flows both ways between fashion and Rihanna—designers from Zac Posen to Dan and Dean Caten of DSquared2 want to dress her. She's one of the few nonpros who can assume the attitude necessary to pull off their designs. "She's sexy, she's proportioned. There's nothing weird about her body. She's full," says Dan Caten. He and his brother Dean actually changed the date of their Milan show last fall so that she could stroll their catwalk. "She was on tour in Canada, and after she had finished her concert, that night we sent a plane, midnight, picked her up, got her to Europe for noon the next day, which was her day off. We did the fitting, did the rehearsal that night. Our show, we planned for nine o'clock [the next] morning so she could be back on a plane at noon the same day to get onstage that night. She was willing to be tired and willing to do it. That kind of energy—some people would be like, `No, no, it's a pain in the ass to go to [Milan].' You know what I mean?"

Following the Proenza show, she performed at A Night to Benefit Raising Malawi and UNICEF, a charity dinner cohosted by Gucci and one of Rihanna's idols, Madonna. She met Madge for the first time on rehearsal day. "She was just there at the front of the stage," Rihanna says. "Watching." Then it was back to L.A. for the Grammy Awards, teaming up with '80s funk giants Morris Day & the Time. There, she picked up her first golden gramophone for "Umbrella" in the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category. In front of 17.5 million viewers, the music industry's power players among them, the then 19-year-old ingenue dragged Jay-Z to the podium and gave him a tender shove after he laughingly translated her acceptance speech. ("He gives me shit all the time," she tells me. "We have this ongoing joke about people not being able to understand what I say because of my accent.") By the time the photo shoot for this story came around, it's no wonder Rihanna was calling in a chiropractor to meet her on set, having messed up her back.

Apparently he worked his magic, because today she's gliding along in five-inch gold-heeled boots. Dressed in superskinny acid-washed jeans and tucked into a second-skin leather motorcycle jacket, Rihanna looks the part of rock goddess, even bringing an entourage along: an enormous bodyguard sipping tea at a nearby table; Christa, her comanager (Rihanna has two); Jen, her assistant; and Melissa and Leandra, two of her longtime friends from Barbados who have been traveling with her for the past couple of weeks. "When I go out on a big long tour, I always take a friend with me," Rihanna says, nodding toward the pair.

"Sometimes I don't want to even go on dates without them. But we do it for each other. I'm her third party sometimes," Rihanna says, pointing to Melissa.

Who in her right mind would enlist Rihanna as a wing woman? Her lean, coltlike legs alone, named 2007 Venus Breeze "Celebrity Legs of a Goddess" by Gillette and insured for $1 million, would make her impossible to compete with.

Does she miss home? "Hell, yeah. So much. Barbados is just—it's so beautiful. It's a part of me. Sometimes it's hard to fit in over here. So I keep these familiar faces around to keep comfortable."

Clearly, Rihanna prefers importing friends from the old neighborhood to rubbing shoulders with Hollywood's Red Bull-soaked masses. Despite the name of her platinum-selling record, she insists she's more a clean-living kind of girl, not all that interested in getting bombed at the clubs—"It's not fun when you can't stand—or in the L.A. scene in general. "There's nothing to do here, I swear," she says, dipping some bread in a pool of olive oil. "There's only so much shopping and partying you can do. I'm not even 21."

She's the oldest of three children (she has two younger brothers, Rajad and Rorrey, both of whom tagged along with big sister at the photo shoot) and was raised primarily by her mother, Monica, who worked long hours as an accountant. Rihanna's relationship with her father, Ronald, was strained throughout her childhood as he struggled with serious crack and alcohol problems. "That was way, way, way back," she says, shaking her head and staring at her dish of pasta. "We're friends now. Now my dad is like the coolest person on the planet. He doesn't smother me. He lets me live my life. And he's been like that a lot, even when I was younger. He would watch me making a mistake and he wouldn't stop me. My dad, he lets me make it and then I learn."

At age eight, she started complaining about excruciating headaches, which plagued her for years. Doctors believed it could be a sign of a brain tumor and ordered a series of CAT scans, which turned up nothing. After a drawn-out separation, her parents divorced when Rihanna was 14. Suddenly, the headaches disappeared. "I never expressed how I felt," she says. "I always kept it in. I would go to school...you would never know there was something wrong with me."

She eventually found a father figure in music producer Evan Rogers, who discovered Rihanna in 2004 when he was vacationing with his Barbados-born wife, Jackie, in St. Michael. As a favor to a friend, Rogers agreed to check out a girl group. After Rihanna walked into the room, he was no longer interested in a package deal. "I thought, If that girl can sing, then she's a star," he recalls. "A lot of time with younger singers, they have a particular singer that they mimic heavily, and I could hear a little Mariah and Beyoncé in there—she sang `Dangerously in Love' by Beyoncé and `Emotion' by Destiny's Child. But there was this edge to her voice—it just cut like a knife."

At 16, an age when most teens are begging their parents to let them take the sedan out on a Friday night, Rihanna persuaded her mother to allow her to leave Barbados and stay with Rogers and his wife at their Connecticut home so that she could finish her four-song demo. "I think her mother was very nervous at first," Rogers says. "But the Barbados connection with my wife, that helped."

After wrapping up production in January 2005, Rihanna headed back to the island and Rogers sent the demo out to a handful of labels, including Def Jam. No sooner had she returned home when Jay-Z requested a meeting with her and Rogers, stat, and Rihanna flew up to New York. "I remember staring into everybody's eyes in the room while I was singing, and at that point, I was fearless," she says about the audition. "But the minute I stopped singing, I was like, Oh my God, Jay-Z is sitting right in front of me." The Def Jam family was interested, so much so that Jay-Z literally locked the doors of his office and wouldn't let them leave the building until they signed a contract, which they did 12 hours later. "We made a little Godfather joke," Jay-Z says. "We said the only way she could leave was through the window."

Music of the Sun was released seven months later, in August 2005, boasting the reggae-esque foot stomper "Pon de Replay" that pumped out of topless Jeeps everywhere and peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hoping to keep the momentum flowing, Rihanna churned out A Girl Like Me just eight months later (lightning speed in the music business), a somewhat uneven album melding '90s-style R&B with dance-hall-lite confections. She caught critical flak for her lack of technical skill and range, as well as the subpar quality of her material, which was largely provided by Rogers and a clutch of producers and lyricists at Def Jam. It's true that Rihanna hadn't offered up a window into her soul through her music, but let's put this in perspective. She was only 18 when A Girl Like Me hit the radio. Whether she was taking a page out of her journal or singing what she was told to, teenage artistry by definition is generally going to be about being a teenager—boys, cheating on boys, hanging out at the mall scoping for boys. To expect poetry from someone barely old enough to buy cigarettes seems a bit of a stretch.

Then of course, there was the rumor that still haunts her today, the one about an involvement with Jay-Z, which reportedly greatly displeased his then-girlfriend, Beyoncé. When I ask Rihanna about it, it's the only time during our interview that she bristles. "Well, it's crazy that you ask me that. People know that it's not true," she says, straightening up. "I think it's kinda a cliché question, and people know it's not true, so I don't even know why it's still addressed to this day. I get asked about it all the time and I'm like, You're asking, but you know the answer. I don't even like to address it anymore." (When asked whether she's dating sweet-cheeked R&B singer Chris Brown, she's much more pleasant, but still careful. "We've always been friends, but we're very close now." Shortly after this interview, Perez Hilton posted an item about them being together in Jamaica.)

Speaking of Beyoncé, the bigger question is whether Rihanna could grow into a version of her—or what will she become, period? If you're not writing your own material (Gwen Stefani) or not a master interpreter (Céline Dion), then what are you? Jay-Z put his office on lockdown for a reason: Rihanna sounds different from all the other R&B vamps who have fallen by the wayside—Cassie, Tweet. She purrs ice and, as Jay-Z points out, there's something about her staccato Bajan lilt that takes a verse to another place. For proof, watch Carrie Underwood, a girl with serious range, on YouTube muscle her way through a cover of "Umbrella" at a stadium concert. Suddenly the song sounds like it should be put to pasture in drugstores and dentists' offices.

Rihanna herself considers both Music of the Sun and A Girl Like Me to be "live and learn" experiences. With Good Girl Gone Bad, however, "I talked to my management, whom I'm very, very close with. And I just told them, `On this album, I don't want it to be only girly, only fun, you know. I want it to be edgy. I want it to be one of those records that you never forget.' I knew exactly who I was, what I wanted to do, what I wanted to sound like, look like, dress like, act like, and that's exactly what I did."

Good Girl has sold 4 million copies worldwide, a bona fide knockout by industry standards. Rather than filling in around one or two radio giants, its songs are all satisfyingly catchy. "I got a house but I need new furniture," she snaps on "Lemme Get That," a Timbaland-produced standout that sounds like it's backed by a marching band. In "Don't Stop the Music," Rihanna makes us want to turn on the black light and party, asking, "Do you know what you started?" In May, Def Jam re-released the album with a new single, "Take a Bow," a breakup ballad penned by label mate Ne-Yo and sung with enough attitude to become the unofficial anthem for wronged women everywhere. "Grab your clothes and get gone/ You better hurry up/ Before the sprinklers come on," Rihanna wails.

And yet for all its strengths, this isn't the album where we get to know Rihanna any better. There's nothing resembling "Cry Me a River" here (JT's supposed Dear John letter to Britney) or even Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful," a song she didn't write herself but the meaning of which she tapped into extremely effectively. Jay-Z, who has banked his career by opening his veins over verses, realizes that at some point Rihanna will have to go a little deeper. "Her last hurdle, as an artist, is to make people feel her, whatever her story is, and her struggle, and let people relate to her, which is a very difficult thing unless you're Mary J. Blige. But there will come a day where she's gonna have to do that. 'Cause after you've hit somebody in the head seven times, after a while they're gonna see the punches coming, and the big records, they're less effective. So now they have to buy into her as a human being."

It could be that Rihanna just hasn't had the time to figure that out. To release three albums in two years demands a killer pace, leaving little time to experience something other than a road-managed, work-around-the-clock life, much less religiously journal about it. "Sitting there writing with her at 17, I could tell she has a real gift to be a writer," Rogers says. "It was frustrating on the third album to see her not be involved with that. She's got it in her to do—she's very creative melodically. It just wasn't possible with the schedule she was on. But she's got that creative gene, and she also has that `I want to say what I'm about.' I expect on this next album she will return to co-writing."

Rihanna recognizes that she's on that brink of superstardom, the place where Britney found herself before the fall. As we spoke, she was readying herself for last spring's most buzzed-about tour, Glow in the Dark, headlined by Kanye West, who personally invited Rihanna to join him on the road. "He reached out to me and was like, `You're going to be the only lady on the tour.' Kanye always gets what he wants," she says.

There might be a clothing line on the horizon, "maybe underwear," she says, and like any icon-in-the-making preparing herself for the quantum leap, Rihanna is thumbing through movie scripts: "I don't know how good I'll be at it, but it's something that I want to try." She is aware that if she can't take control of her own career now, it will likely be beyond her grasp to do so later. It's why she's determined to find what we all call, for lack of a better term, balance.

"I already told everyone in my camp, `This year, I'm not going to work like a horse,'" she says. "In 2007, I didn't really get to enjoy anything that I achieved because I was moving, moving, moving. Even at the Grammys, Jay was asking me, `How does it feel? How does it feel?' I was like, `When I get home and I lock my room and there's silence, I'll tell you how I feel then.'"

"That song is very, very magical," says the singer, nodding her heart-shape face. "Because even when I travel, I can't believe the kind of people that know that record. Their age, their nationality, they don't speak English, but they all know that song."

It also served as the soundtrack for unveiling Rihanna 2.0. With the release of 2007's Good Girl Gone Bad, her third record, the bubble-gum island teen dream, whose formerly sun-streaked hair fell at a safe shoulder-sweeping length, was indeed gone. In her place we found a leather-pants-clad badass, a sex symbol with a café au lait complexion, rocking her black punkish cockatoo crop and studded Louboutins. She reminded us of effortlessly cool front women from the past—Janet Jackson at her "Pleasure Principle" best, Madonna under the Danceteria strobe lights. Well here was an interesting turn of events.

"I kept telling my managers, I'm cutting my hair. I'm cutting my hair. And they're like, `How short? Not too short. Cut it how short?' And I'm like, `Up to here,'" Rihanna says, raising her hand up to her ear. "They never believed me. So when it was time to do the album cover [for Good Girl], the night before I cut it, I dyed it black. We went straight to the photo shoot, and no one at the record label knew what I looked like. When we sent the pictures over, they saw the hair and they all loved it. They loved it."

Perhaps every young artist transforms style-wise when her music changes. Like Christina Aguilera did when she went a bit raunchy for Stripped. "I felt like that was a phase for her, you know?" Rihanna says.

Is this a phase for Rihanna? "It might be a phase, but I won't know until I come out of it. Or I might be like this forever."